


Machineries of Civilization

by SylvanAuctor



Category: Imperial Radch Series - Ann Leckie, Machineries of Empire Series - Yoon Ha Lee
Genre: F/F, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-15
Updated: 2018-02-20
Packaged: 2019-02-02 17:40:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 3,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12731250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanAuctor/pseuds/SylvanAuctor
Summary: A training accident lands Kel Cadet Cheris in the Republic of the Two Systems.





	1. Number of Death

“This is Kel Cadet Cheris of the Fledgemoth  _ Doxastic Shield _ . I am alive, as are Kel Cadet Varion and Vidona Cadet Kireta. Requesting immediate assistance. I repeat, this is Kel Cadet Cheris of the Fledgemoth Doxastic Shield. I am alive, as are Kel Cadet Varion and Vidona Cadet Kireta. Requesting immediate assistance. Low power, unable to continue transmitting. Kel Cadet Cheris out.”

The three of them, clad in environment suits, sat on an airless moon and huddled around the single data pad they had rescued from the moth. Nirai Lidran had perished in the training accident, so Cheris was left as the most mathematically trained of the survivors. Hoping to figure out their rough location, she the broad formants of the calendar in the area. When it displayed, she gasped audibly.

“What?” Varion asked.

“These are the formants of an agnostic regime.” The kind of weak calendrical effects generated by people who didn’t maintain a calendar fit to produce exotic effects. “Base four.”

“Lucky us,” Varion said, and laughed. Lucky unlucky four.

“But that means we’re outside the Hexarchate,” Kireta said.

“Yes,” Cheris said. “Very far.”

“How the fuck?” Kireta asked. “That was a  _ training accident?  _ From Twisted Veins, that’s at least twenty light years! Moths don’t travel that fast!”

“Could have been a rotspike,” Cheris said. Though exceedingly rare, alignments of least common primes between adjacent calendars could activate strange, calendrical effects far from the tangent point. 

“Like I said,” Varion said, “Lucky us.”

The communicator came to life with an authoritative voice speaking in an unfamiliar language.

“Don’t reply,” Kireta said. “If it’s not Kel, we have to presume it’s hostile.”

Cheris was not planning on it. The three of them did not need to speak what they all knew, that they would die before giving any aid to heretics. They watched their supplies of oxygen dwindle.

“It was a pleasure serving with you,” Cheris said, as she felt herself growing incoherent from the attenuated air.

“A pleasure indeed,” Varion said.

“A pleasure,” Kireta said.

Cheris blacked out.


	2. Ancillary Memory

“Station, open the door,” Tisarwat said, slurring and leaning heavily on the wall just outside the gardens.

_ Mercy of Kalr  _ put in her vision,  _ Perhaps now is not the best time, Captain. _

Station added,  _ I’m going to ask you to return to quarters. _

“No, both of you, shut up, I want to go talk to Piat.”

_ I believe that Citizen Piat does not wish to talk to you,  _ Station said.

_ All Fleet Officers to Headquarters immediately,  _ said another message, from neither AI. Technically from another AI. Fleet Admiral Breq Vendaai.

“Oh,” Tisarwat said. “That’s- that’s an order. I’ll get up there.”

_ Perhaps not in this state,  _ said  _ Mercy of Kalr. _

“No, no, I’ve got it,” Tisarwat said, and shambled toward Headquarters. She burst through the door as Breq was speaking.

“...no known match for this insignia on the-” Breq turned to look at Tisarwat, as did Captains Queter, Ettan, and Seivarden.

Tisarwat looked once at the stingray insignia displayed on the screen and said, “Oh, Varden’s rotting suppurating fucking cuticles,” she said. “I thought I dealt with you stick-up-your-ass pricks.”

“Your pardon, Captain?” Breq asked, face now shifted from urgent aggravation to ancillary blankness. The ancillary face was worse.

“No, not you, One Esk, Ceet Flaptain, Admiral, the, the Pentocrats. Pentarchs. Thought I blasted them back to the stone age on Noage Itray. Thought she did. You know what I mean.  _ Sphene _ .”

“I don’t believe I do,” Captain Queter said, speaking for  _ Sphene. _

“Okay, okay, well one time I had a really bad couple of weeks when I was on drugs and I was the Lord of the Radch and won a shooting contest, thanks Nine, and whatever. I know, I’m not proud of it, not cool, she’s not me anymore, sometimes I forget. Like when I’m drunk.”

“I’ll receive your briefing when you’re sober, Captain,” Breq said. “Go to your quarters and get some sleep.”

“Yes, Captain.”


	3. Stingray Gambit

Cheris awoke with a pounding in her head that only got worse when she sat bolt upright in her bed.

“Varion! Kireta!” she called, and looked around. No one else was in her small cell, and no reply came. She struggled to bring her breathing back into her control, and called out for them again. Nothing. Therefore, nothing to do but try to figure a way out of here. First, then, to gather as much information as possible.

Someone had changed her out of her uniform, and put her in a shirt, trousers and gloves all made of the same extruded material. She found herself in a two meter square cell, with a faucet, grate, and bowl of some unknown, slimy leaf vegetable in a bowl on the floor. The walls and clear door, once thoroughly pounded upon, showed no exploitable weaknesses. She sniffed the vegetable, played with the single handle on the faucet, and examined her clothes and bedding for anything useful. The pounding in her head did not go away.

She paced the cell, trying to convince herself that she was making some kind of productive search, while struggling with the very Kel fear that she would not be able to escape alone.

_ What do you call a lone Kel in a paper bag? Neutralized. _

Still, she continued that way until six people approached her cell. By their uniforms, they were of three… factions? Divisions? In any case, two young people were in gray uniforms, one very plain in clothing and expression, the other more ornately decorated with titanite pins, and wearing a concerned expression. Two more were in brown, one perhaps mid forties, the other no older than a Kel cadet, with the most striking violet eyes Cheris had ever seen. The remaining two were in white, decorated with pins, one thirties, the other cadet-aged, and bore striking family resemblance to each other.

As they approached the cell, five seemed to defer to the violet-eyed one, who stepped up to the cell.

“Bright morn,” they said, in a strange drawl. “Ich Vendaai Tisarwat, captain moth Clementing Kaela. Du on station Athoek. Understand?”

_ They are not Kel,  _ Cheris thought.  _ Say nothing. _

Tisarwat glanced back at the two white-coated people and exchanged words in their strange, lilting language. A few words were in the strange dialect of High Language. They turned back to Cheris and pointed at the white-coated ones. “Vidona Deacht Kuenr, Grammarist Deacht Timemna.”

“You are not Vidona,” Cheris snapped before she could stop herself.

“Ich kept Doctrine for unser Monarch,” Kuenr said. Her accent was different. “Ich… Ich force read things known of by you, Kel Cheris.”

“What?” Cheris shrieked. “You did what to me?” She pounded on the glass. “Where are my friends?”

“Where what?” asked Timemna.

“My friends! Friends, understand? Varion! Kireta! What did you do?” She pounded on the glass again.

“Friends, yes!” Timemna said, calmly. They smiled encouragingly. “Mother and ich, wir kommen aus Teleh. Wir understand friends.” As if that explained anything. “Varion and Kireta kommen.”

Cheris sighed. “Thank you. Thank you.”

Two more grey-coated soldiers with blank corpse faces approached from down the hall, holding tightly onto Varion and Kireta, dressed in the foreign grey clothes. Cheris tried not to panic over how they were bound, hands behind their backs. That was good. They hadn’t broken to the captors. These people still feared resistance. The blank-faced soldiers opened the door for a mere second and pushed Cheris’ friends to her. She embraced them tightly, felt formation warmth overwhelm her from Varion.

“You’re alive,” she sighed. “You’re not alone.”


	4. Good Tea, Strange Blood

The impromptu team for dealing with the visitors sat in the lounge of the Fleet Admiral’s apartments overlooking the concourse: Fleet Admiral Breq, head of all Two Systems military, Captain Queter, who had rescued the foreigners on the moon, Translator Kuenr, language researcher, Citizen Timemna, whose presence as a student had been insisted on by Kuenr, and Captain Tisarwat, whose knowledge of Anaander’s purge of the Pentarchate was the only tenuous link to the foreigners’ identity.

“Well, that went well, for voluntary elicitation,” Kuenr said. “I’m very glad that we might have accrued some goodwill with them. I don’t have to put the hawks under drugs again. Whatever’s wired into their heads already makes it very dangerous.”

“No goodwill that we couldn’t have provided them with from the beginning,” Queter said. “I know, I know, standard procedure. Still, good catch on Tim’s part,  _ jaenor la. _ ”

“I will bear Prolocutor Giarod’s frustration in regard to that,” Breq said. “I don’t think anyone in this room has the deepest respect for standard procedure.”

The room snickered collectively.

“Anything on the matter of their ship?” Breq asked.

“Crew of one hundred twenty, estimate, and some sort of small animal-shaped mechs,” Queter said, for  _ Sphene. _ “Collected samples of those. We found nothing that even suggests an interstellar system. No gate generator, nothing. Still, I reconstructed trajectory and am just now coming up in long sensor range of where they appeared in the system. Stand by.”

Some minutes passed.

“Well that’s just disgusting,” Sphene said. “Sending you images, Cousin.”

The thing that  _ Sphene  _ sent to Breq’s large view screen turned Tisarwat’s stomach. It was roughly orb-shaped, the size of a Mercy, and resembled a mass of viscous boiling blood and semicoherent flesh. Where bubbles swelled and popped on its visceral surface, they sent off clouds of some strange powder.

“Have you identified the emissions?” Tisarwat asked.

“Not yet. Probe en route. And whatever this thing is, it’s sending off the wildest electromagnetic interference. If I get any closer, I won’t be able to maintain communications.”

“Keep us informed,” Breq said.

“Sure, Cousin. It’ll be some hours before I have anything else interesting.”

“Fleet Admiral?” Tisarwat asked.

“Yes?”

“Permission to go meet the hawks again, with Timemna?” Tisarwat asked. “I think it would be less intimidating, and she was the one to get the one hawk reunited with the others.”

“Granted.”


	5. Formation Break

“What did you tell them?” Kireta asked.

“Nothing,” Cheris said. “I just… One of them said she was Vidona and I snapped at her. And then another said something about friends and I panicked. For you two.”

“Don’t snap like that again,” Kireta warned. “It’s dangerous.”

“Hey,” Varion said. “Cheris technically outranks us here.”

“Oh,” Kireta said, remembering. “My apologies.”

“Anyway,” Varion continued, “I don’t know that it’s the best idea for us to be uncooperative with these people. It’s not like we actually know much secret about Kel operations. Nothing more than the average, say, Hafn or Eel already knows from records of battle. We can try to get home. Maybe even do some reconnaissance on these heretics.”

“A  _ heretic  _ technically uses some sort of exotic technology,” Kireta corrected. “And still, we can’t put our desire to get home above the needs of the Hexarchate. We have no idea what they could get from us. Who knows what seems benign to us that they could twist to some advantage?”

“Agnostic, then,” Cheris said. “And really, Kireta. Kel Command would know if anything like that were true. These people might not even know about the Hexarchate. We’ll try to get home.”

Minutes later, the one with striking violet eyes and the younger of the two white-coated ones came onto the cell block, followed by a line of blank-faced soldiers carrying a heavy pot, several bowls of varying sizes, bread, and enough spoons for all of them.

“Thank ihn for speaking freilich,” said the white-coated one, whose name Cheris now remembered, Timemna. “We hab besser language understanding every time ihr speak. Our moths are processing es.”

“Not  _ ihr,  _ but  _ you, _ ” Cheris said. “I, you, they, we, you, they.” She hoped that these people used the same ordering of pronouns as she had when learning High Language.

Timemna smiled broader. “Any... noun genders?” she asked, pausing as if trying hard to remember.

“No,” Cheris said. “We have decided to talk to you if you will help us get home.”

“Of course,” Timemna said. “I made a meal for while we talk. From my planet.” She motioned and spoke to the blank-faced soldiers, who spooned out bowls of spicy-smelling corn and bean stew, poured tea, and handed out bread. After serving, they departed. Timemna said, “Enjoy. Now, Tisarwat is the one with governance experience. I will translate for her.”

“Thank you, Timemna,” Tisarwat said. “I will be honest, hawks. This is a bad time. Our government is on a cusp, and we are readying for war with our Monarch.  And now you have…” she deliberated for a long time with Timemna, who appeared to have some nervous tic with her hand, twitching it in weird formations as she thought. “You have put strange flesh that boils, it is as big as a moth, and it hangs in our space. Why do we not call you enemies, only this, that you work with us now.”

“We’ve put  _ what? _ ” Cheris asked.

Tisarwat produced an image of a greyish-pink orb, that did in fact look like some sort of bubbling tumour, ejecting spores like a fungal canister.

“Explain,” she said.

“I don’t know, honest,” Cheris said. “We don’t even know how we got here. Whatever that is, it probably had something to do with it. I know the equations well enough. I can help you.”

“Station says you’re telling the truth,” Tisarwat said. “Good enough for me. We will send you all of the information we receive from this flesh, so you may analyze it.”

Cheris set to work.


	6. Memories

That evening, Tisarwat trusted Station to relate her meeting with the hawks to the Fleet Admiral, and went straight to her quarters. She turned off the lights, rolled herself up in her blankets, and tried desperately to focus only on her breathing, while all of her memories fought for her attention.

She was taking her first look at the stars with her own eyes, just outside the Dyson sphere of the inner Radch, and watching the approach of the Andan bannermoth. She was negotiating with the Pentarchs. She was in command on  _ Justice of Amaat,  _ exchanging fire with the crippled but fierce  _ Codex of Lilies.  _ She was watching the  _ Codex  _ burn up in the atmosphere of Noage Itray. She was giving the order to turn engines on Garsedd. She was at the negotiating table with the first Presger Translator to the Radch. She was listening to Breq tell her about the current state of the Tetrarchy. And all of this circled over and over in her mind, vivid in every detail.

_ Breathe in. Breathe out. In. Out. _

The memories still played in her head.

_ Captain Queter is here to see you, _ said Station.

Tisarwat grunted. “She can come in. Um, lights up.”

Tisarwat shambled out of her bedroom in her wrinkled trousers and shirt. The door slid open, and Queter entered Tisarwat’s living room, carrying a bottle of arrack.

“Hey,” Tisarwat managed. “Um, sit down wherever, I guess. Tea?”

“Hey,” Queter said. “Tim said you aren’t feeling so well.”

“Not really.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“It’s about  _ her, _ ” Tisarwat said, with a vague upward gesture. “I won’t make you try to sympathize with me.”

“Tisarwat,” Queter said, and brought her to sit down on the couch. “If you were her, I wouldn’t sympathize. But you’re not her. You can talk to me.”

Tisarwat sighed. “She can see everything. She can know where and when and how every person in the Radch is feeling, because she can read from any station she wants. She can see exactly how everyone hurts, and she spent literal centuries convincing herself that every harm she does is for the greater benefit of civilization. But now… Now I have all of those memories.” She swallowed hard, felt tears well up and run hot down her cheeks. “Every pain in the whole Radch. I know how to stop them all, too, but I can’t in one body. So my brain just replays all the people I can’t save, over and over. It’s why Piat doesn’t want to see me anymore, because I’m not good at handling it.”

“I can’t imagine that,” Queter said. “What can I do?”

“I don’t know,” Tisarwat choked.

Tentatively, Queter put an arm around Tisarwat’s shaking shoulders. “Is this okay?” she asked.

“Yeah.” She let Queter hold her for a while, then whispered, “Fuck.”

“What?” Queter asked.

“Honored Ingray arrives tomorrow, doesn’t she? With the transitional assistants. And that one who thinks she’s Garseddai.”

“Honored Garal is--” she laughed for a moment, the cut herself off. “Sorry. I just never thought I’d say it. Honored Garal is meeting with Translator Kuenr to discuss the reform of the Hwaean penal system.”

“Aatr’s tits, that’s a horrible sentence,” Tisarwat said, and laughed as well. “ _ Compassionate  _ Removal my ass.”


	7. Predictions

Cheris read the data with the eyes of a moth, making quick work of every observation sent to her by the Crystalmoth. Things were weird from the beginning, and only got worse. Whenever she looked up from the data pad, Varion’s and Kireta’s eyes were on her, full of worry. She waited until the Crystalmoth stopped sending more data, then summarized in Kel register:

“This should not be possible. Remember that a calendar’s central integer determines the telekinetic formant that determines the rest of the calendrical values. Our central integer is six, which is the most stable of the usable formants.” Cheris knew this. She also knew that, looking at the data, the most stable usable formant was seven, and formation instinct allowed Cheris to perform the act of doublethink without feeling the slightest pang of cognitive dissonance. “However, the calendrical projections of this event, solved for their salient primes, all point to the eleventh formant. Previously, we believed that no usable exotics could be taken from resonance on the eleventh, due to its overwhelming power. Attempting remembrances that connect consensus to the eleventh formant results in the death of the subjects by brain injury.”

“So this must be a natural event?” Varion asked.

“Or some heretical experiment,” Kireta said. “I’ve heard of heretics of the eleventh before. Sometimes they produce exotics before they start bleeding out of every orifice in their heads.”

“Thanks for that detail, Vidona,” Varion said.

Kireta gave him a look of puzzlement. “What?”

“Gross.”

 

They slept in a huddled pile, and in the morning, Timemna arrived with breakfast, tea, and one of the haunting blank soldiers. Tisarwat was not with her.

“My mother and Commander Tisarwat are indisposed at the moment, with the  _ δημοκρατία _ transition team from Hwae. I hope you slept well.”

“The demon what?” Cheris asked.

Timemna searched her dictionary for a long while, then laughed. “Nevermind. All of the old houses said basically the same thing, when Fleet Admiral Breq recommended it. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I took a bit of a leap on the translation matrix last night. How do I sound?”

“Good,” Cheris said.

“Vocabulary isn’t a bit weird? No accent?”

Cheris shook her head.

“Hmm,” Timemna said. “Excuse me.” She left the room.


End file.
